One of the most amazing years of my life to date was the year I spent abroad in Italy in college.

I ran out of money quickly due to the minimal savings I had at that point in my life, and the weakness of the dollar to the euro. Thus, I was cognizant of missing out when spring break rolled around and friends ventured off to see new spots in Europe, and I stayed in Florence to get ahead in my studies.

One day, I decided I needed to get out of the house and went walking. I had no destination in mind, and purposefully took turns in directions I wasn’t familiar with. If I couldn’t venture to a new city entirely, why not find something new to see in the city I’d been living in?

After a while of walking, starting to wonder if I should try to make my way back and with no idea where I was in the city, I stumbled upon Piazza Michelangelo right at sunset.

The view from Piazza Michelangeo at sunset is famed and highly recommended to visitors to Florence. Even so, I hadn’t yet made it there at that particular time of day. In my attempt to venture out into a new Florence experience, I’d happened upon an iconic, memorable one through pure serendipity.

That moment came back to me vividly as I re-visited the city for the first time in 6 years. Once again (after recovering from a long flight), I set out to walk the city–with no clear destination in mind–and ended up re-visiting a number of the spots that were regular features in my former year here.

Piazza Santa Croce, the landmark most seared into my memory due to its location within a block of the school (also notable for its dual life: a popular tourist destination by day, a spot where local kids come to drink and smoke by night). Piazza della Signorina, the piazza neighboring the Uffizi Gallery and filled with memorable statues (Perseo’s my favorite). The lovely Arno, still a pleasure to walk along. And, lastly, Piazza Michelangelo. It’s a hike to reach when taking the more conventional, familiar route than I did that day so many years ago, but worth it to look in on a city full of memories and beauty.

That line, spoken by one of the interview subjects of the film Gates of Paradise could be applied as the thesis of the film. Extending out from the subject of pet cemeteries, Errol Morris talks to a number of people with some connection to the industry about subjects ranging from marketing, making music, personal motivation, falling in love, death, life, and of course, the special relationships that form between pet owners and their pets.

Without the context of the film, it can be hard to see just how some of those relate to the existence and business of pet cemeteries. Errol Morris demonstrated an important part of his signature style in the making of this, his first non-fiction, movie: his appreciation for people and what they have to say. By just letting people talk, you can create a piece of art that touches on a range of human experience and addresses some of life’s key issues.

Although I’ve liked other examples of Morris’ work, I likely wouldn’t have been inclined to check this out without the special acclaim it received from Roger Ebert, who called it “one of the greatest films ever made.” Watching a film that ruminates on what death means to the living, and explores the varied things and beings people come to care about most in life, feels a fitting way to honor one of the most known and beloved film lovers in the days following his own death.

There’s your dog; your dog’s dead. But where’s the thing that made it move? It had to be something, didn’t it?”

These words, by a woman who has just buried her dog, are spoken in “Gates of Heaven.” They express the central mystery of life. No philosopher has stated it better. They form the truth at the center of Errol Morris’ 1978 documentary, which is surrounded by layer upon layer of comedy, pathos, irony, and human nature. I have seen this film perhaps 30 times, and am still not anywhere near the bottom of it: All I know is, it’s about a lot more than pet cemeteries.

The film was made by a California filmmaker named Errol Morris, and it has been the subject of notoriety because Werner Herzog, the West German director, promised to eat his shoe if Morris ever finished it. Morris did finish it, and at the film’s premiere in Berkeley, Herzog indeed boiled and ate his shoe.

Ebert writes about the movie in a way that combines the lightness of some of it’s funnier moments (or those funnier moments surrounding the film, in the case of the above) and the depths it really delves into in the course of exploring its subject matter.

Necessarily, considering the film’s premise, pets, and the strong connections people feel to their animals serve as a central subject in the film. But ultimately, the film is all about people. A connection to one of the two pet cemeteries featured is how the movie finds its cast, but each of them presents ideas, viewpoints and experiences based on their own world and character.

Floyd McClure dominates the first half of the film. He’s an animal lover first and foremost with a dream of creating a place for people to set their deceased animal friends to rest. Sadly, he lacks the business sense to follow through on his dream and the plan falls apart after around 450 pets have already been buried in his cemetery.

A messy lawsuit requires that the animals are dug up and moved up to Napa Valley, where the purveyors of a more successful pet cemetery have agreed to re-bury them. The family running the Bubbling Well pet cemetery, the Harberts, dominate the second portion of the film.

They give Morris some variety to work with. Cal Harberts, the patriarch, combines his respect for the grief of those who have lost an animal with an impressive business sense that keeps the cemetery running and quite profitable, by the looks of the settings they’re interviewed in. His wife talks a bit about religion and her feelings on the work they do, as well as giving some of the narrative to connect how the other two main characters of this section became involved: her sons.

The thoughts and experiences of Danny and Phillip add even more character to a film already packed full of it. Danny talks about his experience in business school, first working hard, and then partying; falling in love, and then having his heart broken. Now, he spends many of the hours he’s not helping his parents run the pet cemetery writing and playing music. Often, when the customers aren’t around, he’ll turn it up loud and play his songs so that they fill the valley and add a soundtrack to the resting place of hundreds of pets (many of whom may have been inclined to attack his speakers in life, if my dog’s behavior is any indication).

Phillip left a stressful life in the insurance business to embrace something less fast-paced in working with his family at the cemetery. He’s a clear former over-achiever, and he often drops mentions of his time in insurance in talking about other subjects. He seems to be still grappling with the decision to leave behind his former ideas of success and become comfortable in the world he lives in now. He dwells on ideas that sound right out of a self-help book.

Intercut with the interviews with these memorable and distinct characters, Morris will talk to customers about their feelings towards their pets and their thoughts on death. He takes a break from hearing from people to show the viewers some of the touching tombstones in the Bubbling Well Cemetery. Although not an especially long movie, it often feels like it moves slow to give the viewer time to get to know the people presented, consider their viewpoints and ponder the weighty themes addressed.

I recently made a case to a friend that Jim Beaver had played some role in so many of the best tv shows in the last few years that Mad Men best find a place for him or risk becoming obsolete. Ok, so that’s a bit of an exaggeration and Mad Men’s probably gonna continue to be awesome even if they don’t find a way to fit Jim Beaver into those Sterling Draper Pryce offices (or just Sterling Draper now, is it?), but seriously wouldn’t this show, and most others, be improved by his presence?

I’m glad to see I’m not the only one to notice his ubiquitous ability to improve upon already entertaining tv shows. The AVClub wrote about how what defines a Jim Beaver role is the eagerness of writers to take a perhaps simplistic character and add considerable depth once they realize what they have in the actor playing him. They offer up the examples of Sheriff Parlow on Justified – who ends up becoming a much more fascinating character as this last season progresses (possibly too late SPOILER ALERT: avoid reading the AVClub article if you’re not caught up), Bobby Singer on Supernatural, and Ellsworth on Deadwood. Each of these characters was originally intended for a smaller or simpler role in the show, but ended up becoming someone special to the plot, the other characters, and the viewers as the shows progressed.

He’s also shown up in smaller roles on a few other shows with varying levels of critical acclaim: Breaking Bad, Dexter, and Big Love; all adding to an extensive imdb page full of impressive character roles played over the last few decades.

In addition, he’s built up a reputation for being one of the actors most inclined to interact directly with fans of the shows he’s on and engage with them in intellectual discussions, as well as provide stories from on set. In turns out that the man who repeatedly plays characters who viewers just wanna hug, off set inhabits the kind of real-life persona that, well, people just wanna hug.

When I reached the end of this AVClub piece about Girls, it dawned on me that the closest thing I’ve had to the experience of watching the show is that of watching several films directed by John Cassavetes in college. They both effectively portray fascinating moments that reveal something about human nature that cause discomfort in a way that feels a little too familiar.

It’s been a while since I saw Faces and Shadows, but I remember being struck by the many scenes where characters seemed to lose access to the version of themselves they choose to show the world, and slip into a version that’s normally contained. Usually with the help of plenty of alcohol and some sort of personal drama, the stories people create to communicate who they are to the world get drowned out by raw expressions of emotion.

This isn’t to say the person you are at a formal event is a distinct entity from the person you are when baring your emotions to close friends after one too many cocktails, but that there’s something that rings true to seeing these intimate, awkward moments portrayed by characters from a distance. I think one of the reasons people have some strong reactions to the show is just how effective so many scenes are at making us face that discomfort and any memories it may invoke.

I haven’t had many experiences all that similar to Hannah Horvath’s, but I have had experiences that inspired similar feelings to what I imagine her character going through.

I wasn’t sure how I felt about Girls when I first started watching it, it’s a show that can make you feel and think about such a wide range of things that it can be hard to pin down one opinion on it. I knew it had moments I found funny, some that felt true, others that made me feel uncomfortable to watch, and that it was doing something different than I’d seen done before. In spite of all the positive in that statement, I wasn’t sure yet though if I liked it. I don’t think it was until I watched the beginning of the 2nd season and realized I’d genuinely missed the show that I accepted that I not only like it, but it’s one of the shows I look forward to each new episode of the most.

]]>https://sognodisonno.wordpress.com/2013/03/15/on-girls-and-cassavetes/feed/0iosognodisonnogirlsOn The Sandmanhttps://sognodisonno.wordpress.com/2012/12/26/on-the-sandman/
https://sognodisonno.wordpress.com/2012/12/26/on-the-sandman/#respondWed, 26 Dec 2012 19:07:26 +0000http://sognodisonno.wordpress.com/?p=1393 Although he spends a fairly small amount of time in the Sandman series, Martin Tenbones steals my heart. In a journey of just a few pages in The Game of You, he shows so much heroism, devotion and sweetness that when he dies within moments of reaching his goal — I bawl, every time.

And there will be many times, because The Sandman series by Neil Gaiman is one of the most re-readable pieces of literature I’ve yet to encounter in life. It’s hands down my favorite world to get lost in for a few hours. It’s as rich and layered a work of art as anything I’ve picked up by Dickens, Dostoevsky or Steinbeck, and could give book groups or lit classes at least months of idea rich discussion topics.

Alright, so you get that I like it a lot. The great challenge of writing about the Sandman is figuring out how best to narrow down the many amazing stories, brilliant ideas and endless internal discussions it addresses and inspires into a few key, meaningful paragraphs. Wish me luck.

Some notes on the world of the Sandman:

Largely inspired by the world Gaiman presents in the Sandman series, I made a decision some years ago to base my worldview on the power of stories. In many ways, reality and fact matter much less to me than the meaning and truth that can be gleaned from fiction and insofar as we all choose to see the world through a certain lens, I’ve chosen the religion of story. To say “the world of the Sandman” isn’t exactly accurate, but even to call it a “universe” feels too small, maybe “reality” works best?

From The Sandman: Endless Nights

The main characters of our stories, and the main constants in the reality of the tales, are the Endless. The siblings (in order of age): Destiny, Death, Dream, Destruction, Despair, Desire and Delirium, have existed longer than anything else we can conceive of. They interact with humanity, gods and goddesses, angels and demons, fairies and all manner of creatures from the world that we the reader know, and those beyond.

In the universe reality of the Sandman, any fictional character or creature that people have thought of or believed in exists. Stories have a reality all their own. When belief begins to die and the stories stop being told, the reality of the stories gets weaker.

Some story highlights:

The Song of Orpheus/A Midsummer’s Night Dream

I’m lumping these two together because they’re both exceptional examples of something great art has been doing for as long as it’s been around: taking the thread of older stories and weaving it into something new and uniquely meaningful.

The Song of Orpheus takes the already familiar and heartbreaking story of Orpheus, and makes it all the more powerful by tying it into the larger mythology of the series through the addition of the Endless. They all come together to celebrate their nephew’s wedding – in Dream’s case, his son – and each play their role in his tragic fate.

The saga of the now immortal Orpheus and his complicated relationship with his father becomes an important part of the series’ larger arc, but through this story we get a new telling of an old myth and a chance for richer characterizations of the powerful and often flawed siblings at the series center.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream envisions a special performance of the play of the same name, put on by Shakespeare and his players at the bequest of Dream. In an earlier story, we see Dream make a deal with a young playwright whose ambitions outweigh his talent, for greater skill in exchange for two plays devoted to the subject of dream.

For a performance for the first of these plays, he invites many of the same fairies who help make up its cast of characters. While Titania, Puck, Peaseblossom and the others watch people playing versions of themselves, slight glimpses of their own dramas and desires play out in the audience. Gaiman makes real Shakespeare’s characters and lets them comment on their depiction according to Shakespeare.

It’s a fun, artful representation of something I adore in art: the ongoing conversation between great minds. Like Dante’s incorporation of Virgil into his Divine Comedy, using his writing as an opportunity to have a conversation with his literary hero, Gaiman’s able to honor the influence of Shakespeare on his work while producing a result altogether his own.

Three Septembers and a January

In one of the most charming, moving stories in the series, we spend some time with the one and only Emperor of the United States, Joshua Norton. Pulling from a strange, enchanting story from our nation’s past, Three Septembers and a January starts with a figure belonging to Despair – a man who has lost his fortune and can find little left to live for. Despair summons Dream and offers a proposition: take this man into your realm, see if you can save him from his misery.

From this proposition, Joshua Norton becomes the Emperor of the United States. With a steadfast conviction in the reality of his position, and a sense of civic responsibility too often lacking in our country’s actual leaders, the Emperor charms San Francisco and its tourists. Local businesses begin taking the currency he creates, tourists purchase it from him as souvenirs and locals (including Mark Twain) treat him to meals as a form of paying their “taxes.”

He never regains the wealth he’d once had, but he finds happiness and honor instead. As Delirium proclaims, “His madness keeps him sane.” The story ends with a man whose dream has become so meaningful to so many people that over 30,000 people attend his funeral.

Ramadan

Ramadan is all about images. It’s most effective feature is the contrast between the image of the mythical Baghdad as it was under Harun al-Raschid, and the war torn modern day Baghdad (torn from a different war at the time of the story’s publication – but feeling just as fresh as ever based on events of recent years). This time drawing both from a mix of history and the magical stories described in The Book of One Thousand and One Nights, the tale takes the time to wander through the wondrous streets of a truly great city.

Full of color, great riches, magic and beauty, the Baghdad of this time is the travel destination of an intrepid voyager’s dreams. Harun al-Raschid recognizes that his city is exceptional, that it’s the best possible version of itself, and can’t maintain this special spark forever. Disheartened by thoughts of a grimmer future for the city he loves, he summons Dream and offers the city to him in exchange for its living forever as it is.

While the deal leaves reality with a Baghdad minus the magic and some of its charm, the story of Baghdad in its greatest era persists and serves to give its current residents something to dream about.

Some idea highlights:

1. The Dream Library

“October knew, of course, that the action of turning a page, of ending a chapter or shutting a book, did not end the tale.Having admitted that, he would also avow that happy endings were never difficult to find: It is simply a matter of finding a sunny place in a garden, where the light is golden and the grass is soft; somewhere to rest, to stop reading, and to be content.”

—The Man Who Was October, G.K. Chesterton (in the Dream Library)

When I die, I’d like to go hang out in the Library of Dream, with Lucien. Made up of all the books people have dreamed, but never written (or finished), I could read all the great, lost works of the writers I already know I love and the many I’d be discovering for the first time.

The library is massive – its contents must come pretty close to the size of Borges’ Library of Babel, and yet they take up a space manageable by one hyper-competent librarian. This is possible, of course, because things like space and time work differently in the dream realm than in the one we humans inhabit during waking life.

As described in the notes on the world of the Sandman above, the Endless interact regularly with characters, concepts and religious icons that are all real – even though many would consider the possibility of their co-existence contradictory.

Best represented by the collection of gods, goddesses and incarnated ideas that show up at Dream’s door in Seasons of Mist. Dream has dinner with ancient Norse gods, Egyptian gods, a Shinto (Japanese) god, biblical angels and demons, order (who shows up in the form of a box and a representative of chaos (who shows up as a strange little blonde girl with a balloon), amongst a few others.

It’s suggested that all these entities exist for as long as people believe in them (which reminds me of some characters I left off above: fairies). When belief in gods get weak, they must find a way to adapt. Ishtar, a goddess of love and sexuality (and former lover of Destruction of the Endless), becomes a stripper to find continued strength in the worship of men.

If we want to take this idea to its logical conclusion, it suggests that there’s a truth in powerful stories that goes beyond the all reigning, one and only truth that many of the religious seek and insist upon. It’s not uncommon to gain understanding and meaning from fiction that rings truer than knowledge insisting to be factual. Which brings us to…

3. Reason as a Flawed Tool

“They say miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons to make modern and familiar things supernatural and causeless. Hence it is that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear”

–Shakespeare, All’s Well that Ends Well

“They are using reason as a tool. Reason. It is no more reliable a tool than instinct, myth or dream, but it has the potential to be far more dangerous” —Destruction “Reason is a flawed tool at best, my brother” — Dream

Perhaps a slightly more controversial extension of the idea expressed above (although, I guess the level of controversy in each would depend on who you’re talking to), the Endless, who have lived longer and seen more than any other entity in this reality, consider reason to be a weak way to understand the world.

In a discussion between Dream and Destruction in the 19th century, they bemoan that reason is supplanting other forms of belief and thinking in the minds of humanity. Rather than supposing that reason is actually truer than, say, mythology; in the reality of the Sandman, it’s just one of many ways of understanding the world, and far from the best. But, in taking over how a majority of modern society understands reality, it edges out and weakens other, also true and valid, ways of thinking.

4. The fascinating multitudes inside all of us

“Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull or boring they are on the outside, inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world, hundreds of them, thousands maybe.”

This line is best expressed in my two favorite volumes: The Doll’s House and A Game of You. In the former, Rose Walker falls asleep one night and discovers she has a power in her dreams she’d never imagined. The dreams of her sleeping neighbors all begin to converge and everyone gets a glimpse into the secret worlds inside their lovers’ and acquaintances’ minds.

Some of the dreams are beautiful – a woman dreams of falling in love with a sentence. Others are disturbing – a man who uncannily resembles a Ken doll fixates on images of money and power. All of them reveal greater depths to the characters than Rose’s earlier interactions with them show.

One of Rose’s neighbors, Barbie appears especially boring in her initial appearances in the story, alongside her equally dull fiancee Ken. Her dreams are a special surprise. She enters a rich fantasy world filled with endearing characters, expansive landscapes and the ongoing drama of an important quest. The aforementioned Martin Tenbones belongs to her dream world.

Barbie loses access to her dream world after the night that Rose causes the dreams of the building’s tenants to bleed together. She leaves her disturbing fiancee and starts a new life, less intent on normality. This is where we return to her in A Game of You, in which we learn her dream world has continued to exist in spite of her absence.

Her dreams very literally begin to interact with her waking life, starting with Martin Tenbones’ heartbreaking foray into New York and leading into an adventure that plays out partially in Barbie’s sleeping mind, and partially in the parallel adventure of her new neighbors that venture into the dream realm to help save her.

The story serves as a reminder of something that most of the human characters of the Sandman reality demonstrate at some point – there’s more to people than we see of them in our waking interactions. We all have stories beyond the main one we star in from day to day.

I love that sites like Kickstarter and Seed and Spark are making it easier for artists to find funders at all levels and help fans support projects based on a good idea.

Here’s a good idea I just came across: Movement + Location sounds likely to be a clever science fiction/drama about a woman trying to find happiness outside of her own time and facing both expected and unexpected complications.

The trailer’s worth a watch, I’d be interested in seeing a finished product.

Human beings throughout history have conjured visions of how they imagined the future would look. None of us can ever fully grasp what will be different 10 years from today, much less 100 or more, but we can re-visit the predictions of those that came before us and compare the imaginings of times past with the realities of our present.

At the wonderful Harry Ransom Center in Austin, the current exhibit, “Futureland,” collects the drawings, models, photographs, films and more of Norman Bel Geddes, a forward thinking visionary of the first half of this century. Through the works of Geddes, we can gain a sense of where members of our recent past hoped and dreamed we’d be today. Even more, we can explore the thoughts and creations of a man who played a key role in creating many aspects of the world as we know it today.

In spite of having no academic or professional training in the fields he mastered, or perhaps because this lack of formal education allowed his imagination greater freedom to roam beyond the known, Geddes managed to influence how people think about and experience theatre, architecture, urban design, advertising and the world in general. He started out designing innovative theatre sets and costumes and then moved his talents from the fictional world of the stage to everything from designing buildings, inspiring the modern highway system, product design and inventive, influential advertising campaigns.

One of his most memorable and popular contributions to history was his Futurama installation at the New York World’s Fair in 1939-40, in which visitors could ride through his vision of 1960. This vision included such far-fetched ideas as widespread personal car ownership and a highway system (it’s no coincidence that the exhibit was sponsored by GM). Easily the most popular attraction at the fair, it was visited by a number of luminaries who walked away inspired. Walt Disney viewed the exhibit and likely drew from it in his later design of Disney World. Franklin D. Roosevelt contacted Bel Geddes soon after seeing the exhibit to get his input on what would become the Federal Highway Act in 1956.

You can get an idea of the experience of viewing the Futurama exhibit here, although it’s hard to really wrap our heads around how different this would all look to someone seeing it in 1939 than it does today.

The Futurama exhibit has largely trumped Bel Geddes many other achievements in the memory of the public, but he had a number of other ideas that made a lasting impression. He was behind the concept of revolving tower restaurants, now popular in big cities throughout the world. He designed the first stadium with a retractable roof, an “All Weather, All Purpose Stadium.” Long before war photography was common, he built models to help people visualize the major battles of the war.

Norman Bel Geddes was a man who seems to have never been fully content sticking with the present, he always had one foot in the future. It’s hard to imagine what our world would look like today without his influence.

Fall puts me in the mood for horror stories. My primary horror investment in book form this year was Clive Barker’s Books of Blood, vol. 1-3. I knew Clive Barker had a impressive reputation as a writer, but previously only knew his work through films he worked on or inspired, including several memorable movies I’d be quick to recommend to any horror fan, such as Candyman and the Midnight Meat Train.

Though far from the only film genre with a reputation for unoriginality, many would agree it’s an especially common trait of horror films. Yet the movies that take concepts and visuals from the ideas of Clive Barker bring glimpses of horror to the audience that feel fresh and unhampered by the many familiar genre conventions. It comes as little surprise then that his short stories succeed in the same vein of creativity and visceral imagery that impresses, disgusts and chills the reader.

As in any short story collection, there are standout tales and occasional weak ones. My favorite of the whole collection was the introductory story “The Book of Blood” that provides a general framework for the tales to come, but offers effective characters, symbols and ideas all its own. A man who fakes the ability to communicate with the dead, not believing that the place he’s chosen lives up to its reputation as a crossroads for dead souls and the living world, has his lie forcibly made true upon his body. Part punishment for his ignorance and arrogance, but more out of the opportunity to communicate their stories, the dead besiege him and mark their tales onto his flesh, making him the literal, living book of blood.

Conveniently for the purposes of a book of horror, the crossroads the boy/book meets his fate at is one particular to souls who suffered violent deaths, and the stories we read are those taken from his flesh…

Barker’s stories often return to certain themes. Bodies that can change form in various ways or characters who can change the forms of others. The boy who becomes the book of blood is just the first example in many characters whose physicality can and does become something different in the course of a story. One boy becomes a large pig, hungry for human meat. A woman has the power to change her own body and those of others in any way she sees fit. Two towns combine all the bodies of their citizens into two massive, moving, united bodies – to catastrophic results.

There are also several tales that embrace a Lovecraftian type mythology, suggesting ancient monsters and life forms that predate humanity and, in some cases, were even its original cause. The fathers of “Midnight Meat Train” who live under New York City and must be appeased (again, with human meat) bear a similarity in concept to the fathers of “The Skins of the Fathers,” though the latter are portrayed as only defensively violent, preferring acts of creation (specifically, the creation of man) over those of destruction.

He also incorporates different forms of art into his stories in inventive ways, often as metaphors or launching pads for stories about expression. There are the actors who come back from the grave in order to perform the perfect play; movie images that come to life and interact with the world fueled by a rogue cancer–making the iconic images of Marilyn and John Wayne into tools of terror; and, the woman who can change her own and others’ physical forms –an extreme extension of the skills of a sculptor, or a more general metaphor for the artist’s ability to create a new reality out of the one she sees around her. And of course, there’s the boy whose flesh becomes a book.

It’s no coincidence that the introductory story embraces so many of these themes. It’s really a perfect encapsulation of much of what’s to come. The introduction of creative violence, the supernatural, a thin line between life and death and the transformative nature of the physical form – with a tendency for the resulting form to become a symbol of something larger. I liked many of the stories throughout the collection, but it was really this first that stuck with me and left me most in awe of Barker’s talent. He has a special skill for weaving unique tales of the gruesome and macabre that feel profound instead of sensationalist, as much modern horror is wont to be.

Absalom, Absalom is one of those books that regularly wows you as you’re reading. I found myself having to set the book aside from time to time to marvel at just how much it was able to pack into the story of a Southern family whose fortunes are created and destroyed in parallel with the experiences of the South before, during and after the Civil War.

It’s a special challenge to try to cull something brief, yet meaningful from a book that deftly covers so many issues so deeply. The characters that inhabit the book become symbols of the destructive influence of racism, the confining roles available to women in the period, the way history is passed along to new generations – in pieces, with some parts always missing, just how much the Civil War shook the reality of those affected by it and a nearly infinite number of possible issues and ideas beyond.

At the center of the all encompassing tale in question is the often mythic, but ultimately pathetic figure Thomas Sutpen and his persistent goal. Inspired by an iconic moment in his youth where the realities of the arbitrary societal hierarchy that assign a person value based on race, wealth and gender hits him like an epiphany, he sets out to secure himself and his future progeny a place at the top of the social order. At the moment that he makes this decision, any considerations of morality or personal responsibility that fail to fit neatly into his plan for success are quickly discarded or, more likely, fail to make way into his mind at all.

It’s precisely his insistence on basing his plan for success on the arbitrary social hierarchy that results in its eventual, dramatic failure. Early in his efforts he marries and has a child with a woman he perceives to be acceptable for his purposes. When he learns she has an indistinguishable amount of blackness in her blood, he unceremoniously dumps her and heads off to a new life, feeling the abandonment justified by her family’s decision to keep this oh-so-important bit of information from him.

Ensuring an epic Shakespearean or Biblical (hence the title) feel to the story, the plight of his abandoned, slightly black (but for all visual purposes entirely white) son ensures the destruction of the new, acceptable family and empire Sutpen manages to build in Mississippi.

Sutpen’s Hundred, the 100 acres that become his realm, is a place that never comes across as happy or beautiful in its various descriptions in the book. To Sutpen, it works as a symbol of his success in his goals and newfound position of power in the society that once scorned him. For his wife, slaves, children (both legitimate and slaveborn) and Miss Rosa, who becomes one of the primary narrators of the tale, it’s a confining setting. One where Sutpen rules and the others exist primarily to bend to his will and live out the lives expected of them.

Most of the slaves in the various re-tellings of the story never rise above general descriptions of wild brutes. The only one that is treated as an individual is Sutpen’s daughter Clytemenestra and even she is often described as almost a shadow of Judith, living a similar life of servitude, minus any possibility of a husband or the new life that comes with one. Some semblance of whiteness is required for any of the storytellers to deem a person worthy of rising to the heights of a character with a name and distinct attributes.

Sutpen’s heir, Henry, befriends his abandoned son, Bon. Theirs is more than a typical friendship, their bond is brotherly before either learns of their actual familial ties and Henry’s regard for Bon is excessively admiring. Henry’s prepared to marry his sister off to Bon long before they make their first trip back together to Sutpen’s Hundred, and his mom and sister are happy to concede to the plan. The only one hesitant is Sutpen, somehow recognizing himself too closely in the features of this new character who has entered into his children’s lives.

Sutpen’s original sin is his belief in and allegiance to the societal hiearchy, which leads to the two primary sins that lead to his destruction: the abandonment of hist first family and his refusal to ever acknowledge Bon as is son — even when it’s clearly the best, least messy method of ending the engagement between son and daughter.

Instead, he treats Henry as an instrument in ending the relationship between the two. First through the revelation of incest. Then, when that’s not enough to set one son against the other, he reveals his knowledge of Bon’s slight blackness, dealing the blow that ensures fratricide. His actions end with one son dead, another on the run from the law, a daughter resigned to a lonely life of spinsterhood and a surprisingly large cast of additional characters whose lives are left in ruins due to a mix of the flawed decisions of this one mythical man and the war that waged alongside his family’s drama – one attempting to topple the arbitrary social hierarchy (or its most troubling offshoot, at least), the other toppled by it.

Note: I somehow managed to write over 800 words without mentioning Quentin Compson, one of my favorite characters in all of literature and one of the storytellers that passes along the tale of Sutpen. While his tortuous feelings towards his sister and tragic fate are never addressed explicitly in Absalom, Absalom, they hang over the novel to anyone who knows him from The Sound and the Fury as he discusses the story of three siblings with a special bond, two of them close to marriage.

There are many technical, dry books to be written about the history and analysis of the English language, and many that already exist. Linguistics isn’t a subject known for its ability to generate excitement. Luckily, Bill Bryson, a modern day master at taking complex, hard to communicate subjects and weaving them into fascinating, entertaining stories that enrich readers, opted to pore through many of the drier tomes on the English language to cull fascinating facts and tales to fill his book on the subject, The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way.”

1. Before the printing press, people saw little need for regularized spelling. People wrote words how they they sounded, so the same word would have any number of spellings according to the person writing it down and the pronunciation in their particular geographic location (which would often be different from the pronunciation of nearby towns and villages).

The reason many of our current spellings are so unintuitive, is that the push for a consistency in spelling that came with the printing press did not correspond with a push for regularity in pronunciation. Pronunciation continued to evolve after the spellings had become fairly stable. For example, the “k” ceased to be pronounced in words like “knee” and “know,” the “l” in words like “folk” and “would,” etc.

2. The number of words in the English language is subject for debate, but most agree it’s at

Bill Bryson

least 3 million (most dictionaries have somewhere in the range of 300,000 to 600,000). The vocabularies of individuals are much smaller, but the average number is even more debated than the total number in the language. Estimates have ranged from 300-250,000. These estimates are further complicated by the fact #3.

3. 43 words account for half of the words in common use. 9 words account for a quarter of those in use*. In other words, we each know far more words than we regularly employ.

4. Shakespeare never spelled his own name the way we spell it today. He also didn’t bother spelling it the same way twice in any of the examples we still know of.

5. O.K. is the most widespread of all English words, used in cultures and languages throughout the world. It’s also one of the most grammatically versatile, serving in different contexts as an adjective, verb, noun, interjection and adverb.

6. The differences in British and American English are often inexplicable. One strange example: in the UK the Royal Mail delivers the post, in the States the Postal Service delivers the mail.

7. English is considered an official language in 44 countries, more than any other (2nd is French at 27).

8.There is such a thing as a professional pronouncer, they’re called “orthoepists” (No, I don’t know how to pronounce that).

9. There’s a city called Eighty-eight in Kentucky. In 1948, 88 people from Eighty-eight voted for Truman, and 88 voted for Dewey.

10. Some cultures never curse – Japanese, Malayans, Polynesians and Native American languages have no swear words. But, most do. The Ancient Romans had 800 curses in their language.

11. Palindromes are at least 2,000 years old.

12. The citizens of Boonville, California invented a langauge called boontling that was used in the isolated town for at least 30 years.